Search This Blog

A Graveyard for Gossip

Read these next three phrases, and ask yourself what you think when you've heard someone say one or more of them to you. "Have you heard...?" "You're not going to believe this...!" "You cannot tell anyone what I'm about to tell you...." As soon as someone begins a sentence with these words, we know that what comes next is going to be juicy. We've been trained to move to the edge of our seats when we hear those phrases being uttered. Because we love us some gossip, don't we? Unless it's about us. I've been on the wrong end of gossip before. As a pastor, it kind of comes with the territory. I had a church member once who seemed to take great pleasure in making up fantastic stories about me, and sharing them with anyone who would listen. "No one really takes her seriously," a church staffer told me. "They know she loves to gossip, and they just take everything she says with a grain of salt." That's the basic excuse that most of us give when we gossip--that it's essentially harmless, and that no one really gets hurt. Until they do, which invariably happens at some point or another. Because at some point when we speak words of gossip, those words land on the person we're speaking about. They either land directly on them when they find out what's been said, or they land on them indirectly when their reputation is tarnished, and they are diminished in the eyes of others. I was reading today about how to overcome a critical spirit that leads to gossip and a quote from E. Stanley Jones jumped out at me. He wrote, "Let your heart be a graveyard for gossip." I need this in my life. Maybe you do, too. My heart needs to be a place where gossip goes to die. When it's shared with me by others... when it festers up inside of me, begging to live and poison the air around me... I need to let my heart be a graveyard for those kinds of killing words. May you let your speech be seasoned with the salt of what is good, pure and holy today and every day. May your heart be a place where the chain of killing words is disarmed and falls apart. May you speak grace and peace into the world. And may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you now and always. Amen.

Popular posts from this blog

It's also one of those Sundays when you can't ignore the church calendar and just preach whatever you want. I am sure that some people do just that, but they probably aren't Presbyterian, and I am sure that the liturgical rhythm of the Church is not first and foremost in their mind.

And they probably have had no trouble at all working on their sermon this week.

I'm not one to blindly follow tradition, but there are some things that you just don't do---and you can't just ignore the story of Jesus' Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

But this leads to a bit of a quandary... In the short time I have been doing this whole preaching thing I have gone through the Palm Sunday story a few times. After a while you sort of wonder if your congregation has heard your Palm Sunday riff a few too many times.

That sermon needs to get preached, though. While we celebrate the cheers and palm waving …

This week I am launching a new sermon series, "Family Values: Rediscovering What's Really Important." The idea is pretty simple...

Our culture has become marked by anxiety. There is no way to escape the deluge of bad news that just seems to permeate the air around us. Some blame it on the recent 24-hour news cycle that was once a phenomenon, and is now just the status quo. Others blame it on the immediacy of information from cable TV, the internet, smart phones and social media.

There is the passage of Scripture from Psalm 85 where the psalmist extols the virtues of those who are walking in pilgrimage to the Holy City of Jerusalem with the blessings of God all around them. "They move from strength to strength," he writes. Strength to strength... that sounds beautiful doesn't it?

Unfortunately, I think that most of the people in our culture move from fear to fear. We move from being anxious about terrorism to being anxious about war. We were fearful…

I went to the Holy Land Experience yesterday with my youngest son, who happens to be five going on forty. It was my first visit to the Christian-based Orlando theme park since the Trinity Broadcasting Network bought it some years ago. I went, quite frankly, because my wife and older son went on a 15 day trip that included several days in the real Holy Land, and I promised my little guy we would one-up them. Our mission was not to merely experience the Holy Land Experience as a means of one-uppance. We knew that wouldn't cut it. Our mode of one-uppance was going to come when we got our picture taken with Jesus, which we were certain we would be able to do. The brochures and television ads clearly showed Jesus walking around greeting people in the park. We decided that a photo op with Jesus himself would pretty much trump any ancient ruins that the other two members of our family visited. In a moment of kindness I will include you on my little photo safari through the land of …